


isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?

by IShipItAllAndThenSome



Series: Codas About Giving Them Some F*cking Emotional Support [2]
Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: 3rd Person Limited POV, Canon Compliant, Chess Metaphors, F/F, Gen, Kara And Lena Are Best Friends, Lena Luthor Doesn't Know Kara Danvers is Supergirl, Lena Luthor Gets a Hug, Lena Luthor Needs a Hug, Lena Luthor's Emotional Boxes, Luthor Siblings Strife, POV Lena Luthor, References to s2ep12: Luthors, References to s4ep06: Call To Action, References to s4ep12: Menagerie, References to s4ep13: What's So Funny About Truth Justice And The American Way?, Season One Superfriends HQ - Freeform, Speculation on Spoilers, it's all very fraught and repressed and gay, on technicality, yes the flowers mean things but no it wasn't immediately intentional
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-09
Updated: 2019-03-09
Packaged: 2019-11-14 08:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18048872
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IShipItAllAndThenSome/pseuds/IShipItAllAndThenSome
Summary: The sequel/partner-in-crime to"which nobody can deny". Lena gets Kara caught up on things; I make vague guesses about things which the CW will never elaborate upon.





	isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?

**Author's Note:**

> title from "I Need A Hero" by Bonnie Tyler which is in fact a SuperCorp song
> 
> anyways, a little while back I wrote [A Thing](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17875868) about Kara finally getting some emotional support in these trying times and someone asked about Lena getting the same, and I was like "but I _always_ write about lena, i'm trying to test my kara pov skills" and held off exactly two weeks before writing this in one sitting the same night as i wrote [That Other Angsty Lena Character Piece About How Much She Loves Kara](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18046778). so. we know where my head's at in times of trouble :)

In the weeks since Valentine’s Day, Kara has definitely adapted to Alex’s memory lapses. Lena had been watching, very carefully, to see if her friend is feeling any better, if things have improved, and while Alex’s memory still had its sticky spots, she seemed more like herself at the D.E.O., and Kara didn’t seem to get stuck in them with her.

Which was good, on both counts.

Lena’s glad that they’re adapting. Adapt or die, after all. Roll with the times or get crushed beneath the boot of progress.

 _God_ , she thinks, _it’s like he’s in my head, too._

She doesn’t know how Lex got a phone in prison—at least, not the specifics. Maybe someone smuggled it to him, maybe he built one out of pilfered parts from guards’ radios and prison computers and cameras, she has no idea. Quite frankly, she doesn’t want to know; the less he touches her life, the more she wants to live it.

She wants to live it a lot less, lately.

 

“Are you sure you want to come with me to another spin class?” Lena asks, eyebrows arched at Kara over both their coffee cups—Kara’s adorned with a smiling Saturn, Lena’s with a CatCo logo from before the buyout and retrieved from Kara’s desk drawer. “Last time, I practically had to carry you out of the gym.”

“Well, everything gets better with repetition, right? Stronger muscles, faster reflexes, better answers to hard questions…”

Kara trailed off, and her cheeks went pink. It was a delicate color, like the innermost petal of a peony, or a cluster of pink hydrangeas. Lena had a sudden vivid sense memory of trailing her fingers along the velvety texture of a flower petal, too afraid of causing the poor thing pain to pull even one off and start counting loves and love-nots, and gulped down a piping mouthful of espresso to wash the feeling away.

“Post-concussive syndrome is treatable,” Lena said, feeling immensely awkward and abrupt as she cut through the subtext. “Stress, though, is detrimental to recovery. I know she had to take over when her mentor retired, but maybe—if she could delegate for just a week, even, it might help.”

“Maybe,” Kara replied, tracing her finger around the rim of her mug. “I don’t think she can, though. Everything is so busy, now, with the—“ Her nose wrinkled spitefully. “ _Children of Liberty_ , running around, hurting people. I can’t believe President Baker would deputize—!”

Lena’s eyes widened. “Wait, what?”

Kara’s whole face scrunched up around her tightly-shut eyes. “Oh, gosh, I haven’t printed that one yet.”

“Is it all of them, or just Lockwood?”

“Just Lockwood.”

Lena set down her borrowed mug and curled her hands up in her lap. “Kara?”

“Yeah?”

“There’s something—a lot of things, actually—that I need to talk to you about. But one is—it relates to that. Maybe not directly, but in so many indirect ways that I can’t help but fear that when they converge, it’s going to be horrible, and it—it might be my fault.”

Kara’s brow furrowed, and then she reached across the table, palm up. For a moment, she just left it there, but then she curled her fingers in a universal beckoning gesture, and what else could Lena do but allow her own fingers to be cradled, carefully, like a Faberge egg, or a marshmallow heart, in her best friend’s hand?

“Whatever you need, okay?”

Lena nodded, and nearly opened her mouth to speak, but then Kara frowned, squeezing her fingers once as if in warning. “Maybe not here,” she whispered, shooting Lena a covert wink.

Oh. Yes. Perhaps the very visible balcony of the company which was owned by one of them and employed the other, surrounded by Kara’s coworkers, with no way to avoid or evade whatever atrocious spy ring Lex had probably set up to capture and relay her every move to him, wasn’t the most appropriate place for this conversation.

“I have a terrible habit,” Lena said, collecting her coat and coffee cup, “of letting my guard down around you. It’s like everything else falls away, and I can’t keep a secret to save my life.”

Kara knocked their elbows together, and held the door while Lena ducked inside. “I feel the same way around you,” she said softly, with a weight to her words like a finger on a bruise.

 

Eventually, they found an old abandoned office, stocked with far too many computers, a few squeaky faux-leather wheelie chairs, and a white board that Kara flipped over before sitting down. “Park it,” she said, grinning, and Lena did. “Now, what’s up?”

Where to start? The trials, Adam’s death, the contract, Lex showing his hand—only now, which meant he was so far into some plan that she couldn’t stop it?

Somehow, of all the things she had yet to spill, what came out first was, “James and I broke up.”

The reaction played out plainly on Kara’s unguarded face—shock, empathetic sorrow, a flicker of something Lena couldn’t name or quantify—and it was almost gratifying.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” Lena steamrollered on, “because you seemed so… I don’t know, invested, I suppose, in the two of us being together. We argued a lot. I don’t think he ever truly got past not trusting my name, and I should have let it stay the way it was before.”

“I wasn’t invested in you two being together, Lena,” Kara interjected softly, once Lena paused for breath. “I thought he made you happy. You’re my friend; all I want for you is happiness.”

“Oh.” Lena swallowed, imagined the sticky smell of packing tape dispensed viciously from a tape gun, holding shut a box overstuffed with—

“What did you fight about?”

“Our beliefs, I suppose. Most recently, about what I was doing with my business.”

“CatCo?”

“L Corp.”

Kara frowned. “But that has no bearing on him, why would he care?”

“Do you remember Thanksgiving? What I hypothesized?”

With a slow nod, Kara repeated, somehow verbatim, “‘No matter how many weights you lift, you’ll never be as strong as Supergirl. What if we could do more? What if we could make people super?’”

Lena dug the heel of her stiletto into the ugly carpeting. “It sounds so much less insane when you say it.”

With wide eyes, Kara leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “Lena…?”

“Somehow, the… agency that your sister works with, her Army liaison, caught wind of it. The government offered me a contract, funding and supplies for result. Not process, just result; I make one meta-human, and then I’m done. And they are, too.”

“Oh, my god.”

“I know. It’s—it sounds bad, it sounds worse than bad. And she offered it to me, two weeks ago—the contract—and I’d just gotten…” Lena shook her head, throat tight. “It doesn’t matter. There’s no excuse. Especially because it won’t work.”

“Well, if you’re in charge, of course it will.”

“Not the experiment, Kara.”

Lena heard, as if from a third party observer’s ears, her own voice shaking. How embarrassing.

“What’s got you so shaken up, Lena?” Kara asked softly, toeing her chair close enough that their knees knocked together, taking her hands once more. “I mean, literally, you’re trembling like a leaf.”

“Lex sent me a message that morning. And I knew he would go after the people closest to me, and what he said, I thought, ‘it has to be James,’ so I tried to make him—god, it was so stupid—I tried to make him flee the country with me.”

Kara’s jaw dropped.

“Of course, I didn’t say it like that to him. I just offered, you know, Valentine’s in Paris. I already felt bad enough, he’d gotten me a gift, and I hadn’t gotten him anything, and what better gift than avoiding the wrath of Lex Luthor?”Lena ducked her head, felt herself leaning instinctively forward—like an entanglement contracting, dragging two particles together on some atomically predestined collision course. “And then Hayley came. And she offered me a chance to put my efforts towards government research, and I don’t trust the government as far as I can throw them, which is ‘not at all.’ I think maybe Supergirl could collectively toss them all at once, but all the spin classes in the world won’t give you super strength.”

“I don’t think you’d want super strength in a spin class, anyway,” Kara offered.

“No, maybe not.” Lena caved in, her forehead thumping down against the curve of Kara’s thumbs where they lay over the backs of her own hands. Layers on layers on layers, like the mineral striations of a planet’s crust. She could imagine that, somehow becoming fused to Kara like this, stuck forever bowing for forgiveness and comfort, her hands held in that tender grip. “I just… I couldn’t let anyone else get hurt. I thought, maybe, if I didn’t have to work out of my own building, odd hours so nobody saw, keeping things under wraps—if it didn’t have to be as much of a secret, I could do a better job.”

Kara said nothing for a moment, and then, almost a whisper, “I can’t imagine keeping a secret like that is easy.”

“So I agreed. Part of me was even relieved, like if I had the Army at my back, Lex couldn’t hurt me. Couldn’t hurt—anyone I cared for.” Lena scoffed. “They weren’t any help last time. The only thing that could stop him was Superman, and even that didn’t stick.”

“Wow.”

“And then we were… in the car, going towards the airport, when Lex sent me another message. The same message, actually, but a second time.”

“What was the message?”

“‘C5 to E1.’” Lena swallowed harshly. “Taking the queen’s side knight.”

Kara said nothing, for a long moment. “Huh.”

“So I—I picked a fight with James, in the car. We were downtown, lots of people around, lots of security cameras. The car had smartGPS, too. Lex easily had a million different ways to overhear. I brought up my government contract, knowing it would set James off, and then broke up with him for it. Now Lex knows I have the literal Army at my back, and he won’t have a target.”

“Because you and James are over.”

“It should have been over a while ago, but at least this way, I know Lex won’t hurt him.”

Kara extricated her hands from Lena’s, leaving her feeling shockingly vulnerable, only to then put one on her shoulder and the other on her cheek. “Hey. It’s going to be okay. You did the right thing, the smart thing.”

Lena sat up, swallowed harshly. “He’s so boring with his coded metaphors, honestly. A little reference to chivalric code, a little ‘everyone in your life will die if you disobey me;’ his tastes haven’t changed since high school. And he isn’t even right.”

“About what?”

“Well, if the knight thing is a reference to James being Guardian, it’s not _wrong,_ but if it’s because that was always my favorite piece, well—“ Lena shrugged, suddenly finding it impossible to look up from her naked hands where they sat in her lap. If she squinted, would she see the traces of Kara’s handprints, like words on a screen hovering as photonegatives in your vision when you looked away, glowing over her skin? “Even when we were together, he wasn’t my favorite person, was he?”

Kara’s thumb, on her cheek, moved in a comforting little arc, like wiping dust off the top of a moving box forgotten in a storage unit while preparing to slice cleanly through the tape keeping it shut, like drying a tear.

“And I could’ve been fine with that. James and I being done, the government getting one unique soldier they could never replicate, but if Baker deputized Agent Liberty…”

In the hanging space, the implication of Lena’s unfinished sentence, Kara’s hand went still. “You think they might have you give him powers.”

Lena nodded, pulling out of Kara’s grip, folding in on herself. “The last person I gave powers to… it went wrong. He died.”

“Oh, Lena—" 

“If they tell me to give Lockwood powers,” Lena said, slowly, and with great deliberation, “I think the same thing will go wrong. He’s caused enough harm as an ordinary human man with an inferiority complex, this world couldn’t bear the brunt of his actions if he was as strong as Supergirl. And it’s selfish, but I couldn’t bear giving him that power, knowing what he’ll do with it.”

Kara stood, and from Lena’s vantage point, with the dying yellow lightbulbs flickering above her and refracting off her hair, her feet planted, she looked more powerful than anyone Lena had ever met. Stronger than Lex. Stronger than Supergirl.

Then, she stooped down, bending at the waist to throw her arms around Lena, and the same way it always did, Lena’s heart fluttered like a winged thing, as if it could lift her off the ground, and her hands floated off her knees to rest, gentle in their uncertainty, on Kara’s back.

“Thank you for telling me,” she murmured, her voice felt rather than heard, rumbling through Lena’s shoulder and the side of her throat. “For telling me everything.”

Lena’s featherlight fingers clenched around the fabric of Kara’s blazer like vices. “I don’t think I can do this alone,” she admitted, and that was the thing that hurt worst to say. An admission of weakness, of incompetence. She might as well have put bicycle reflectors on all her soft spots, alerting passersby of just where to prod to do the most damage. “I need someone I can talk to about all of this, someone who doesn’t think I’m evil, or crazy, someone who trusts me, or I’ll go insane.”

“I trust you,” Kara said, and there was that unexpected weight to her words, the feeling in her voice Lena couldn’t quantify. “I don’t think that you’re crazy. And I _know_ that you’re good.”

Lena thought she might crumble into dust when Kara let go of her, or float away on the weak, stale breeze coming out of the vents. She thought she might cry, and never, ever stop.

“You can always talk to me, about anything,” Kara continued, “but if there’s anything else I can do to help, just say the word.”

Lena shut her eyes tightly, knuckles white against Kara’s spine, and said thickly, “My hero, every time."

**Author's Note:**

> i hope this turned out okay; i took two melatonin and then was scrolling through comments to wind down before getting ready for bed and saw the same username on both of my recent one shots and then wrote this when i should have been actively sleeping. Mlod, thank you for inspiring this piece! i hope it fulfilled the need for lena getting some love, and i hope it like... didn't actively suck!! 
> 
> also, if anyone has/doesn't have chess experience and is curious about the chess metaphor, the implication of the message Lex sent was that he, the black bishop (a.k.a. the power behind the scenes, overlooked for pieces with more status a.k.a. Supers), will take the white knight on the queen's side, a.k.a. her favorite and her protector. people are speculating about this week's episode and if you aren't part of the speculation i won't drag you into it, but if you are... im yellin


End file.
